* cababarant *

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Belated vacation pics

Wall design in the unfinished chapel of the Batalha Sanctuary, Batalha, Portugal

Now that I've finally recovered from vacation, here are a few pics from our hot-weather trip to Portugal and Spain.

We started our trip in Batalha, Portugal which is about 20 minutes away from Fatima. Not only is it 20 minutes away from Fatima, it is 15 minutes from the freeway via a winding, carsick-inducing, hair-raising 2-lane road. The funny thing is that after the third time driving it, I was used to it -- but I still wasn't used to the way Portuguese drivers ride your tail the whole way up and down the roads. This is a view of the huge gothic Batalha Sanctuary, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site (and rightly so). It is literally the center of the town of Batalha.

Monks in the hedge garden inside the Batalha Sanctuary.

There were lots of visiting monks and nuns on tour in Batalha. In fact, the little guy was at one point acting like a real little brat at the sanctuary, crying, whining and acting up. Some visiting nuns ahead of us turned around and gave him a little medallion of Mary with a card attached (a very different reaction than laypeople usually have to the little guy's tantrums!). It so happened that they were a visiting group from a convent in Quezon City, Philippines of all places!

A nun doing the stations of the cross in the Fatima Sanctuary

Next up was Fatima, where we were in the region to see the holy sanctuary where three children met the apparition of the Virgin Mary in the early 1900s. A lucky coincidence is that we happened to be there on the 13th of the month: on the 13th of the months between May and October, there is a mass and procession at Fatima to celebrate the Virgin Mary sightings (which took place during those months in 1917. It was really incredible to see the crowds waving their hankerchiefs at the statue of Mary as it went around the sanctuary and back into the chapel, many of whom were weeping and weeping. It was something to behold.

Statue of the Virgin Mary during the procession on the 13th.

Wax limbs for burning at at the Fatima Chapel.
Outside of the sanctuary, there were lots of religious tchotchkes for sale, including giant candles and wax limbs for bringing into the sanctuary to burn in prayer. I guess the limbs are for praying for a specific body ailment. (It's things like this that make people think of Catholicism as freaky, I'm sure!)

After our pilgrimage in the northern part of the country, we headed south to the beaches in the Algarve. We were staying in the tiny town of Moncarapacho, which is less than 100 kilometers from the Spanish border. It was hot down there.

A road sign in Setubol.
The funny thing about this sign is that five minutes earlier, we were driving around Setubol (trying to find a way out) and we saw a little old man on the side of a very busy street pushing a wheelbarrow, slow as a snail. I guess it's enough of a problem for them to require a sign for it-- and you'd better not be caught pushing a wheelbarrow while walking your cow!

In the eastern part of the Algarve, many of the nice beaches are on sandbars. This is the beach at Santa Luzia, where you need to take a little 'Noddy' train to the beach. I haven't been much impressed with European beaches in the past, but the beaches we went to in the Algarve were excellent, with actual turquoise water, even. It made me forget that they are actually on the Atlantic ocean.

We went to Lagos, where the beaches sit between tons of rock formations. It was especially cool because you can take a boat ride with a salty old Portuguese guy who will drive in and out of the caves and point out how the rock formations look like Elvis and King Kong (I didn't agree, but hey, you just have to nod like, "Ah, yes, King Kong..."

On the little motor boat with the crusty old tour guide.

Eating biscuits after a morning spent swimming.

Next up was Madrid. We took, first, a long bus ride from Faro, Portugal, to Seville, Spain, followed by a trip on the AVE high-speed train from Seville to Madrid. Exhausting.

Garden at the Museo Sorolla

Most of my photos from Madrid are of our eating adventures (which I've posted over at Crispy Waffle) but we did hit some favorite spots, including the little Museo Sorolla which is a few blocks from where I once lived. It is the artist Joaquin Sorolla's house, transformed into a museum after his death, and is one of my favorite museums ever. It has many of the same qualities as the Mauritshuis (which is my all-time favorite): a relatively small space, both are old houses with intimate spaces for viewing large works. In addition, the Sorolla museum has a beautiful little Moorish garden, originally designed by the artist himself.

Of course, we had to go to the Prado and visit Las Meninas. There was also a great Picasso exhibit going on, which featured his series of Las Meninas variations, as well as other works inspired by Prado masterpieces. This, Los tres Musicos, was the little guy's favorite. He called it Robot Parade, after his favorite song from They Might Be Giants No! album. Clever, little guy!

One of the places we went was a convent where they sold various types of pastries. I had read about it somewhere-- one of our guidebooks maybe-- so we headed over there because it was close to Plaza Mayor, where we were getting some bocadillos calamares (Plaza Mayor is famed for its squid sandwiches). The convent is a "closed" convent, which means you can't see the nuns who reside there, so the purchase window was a weird spinning lazy susan, from which a disembodied voice took your orders. So bizarre! The pastries weren't that great, but the whole thing was crazy and weird, so it was well worth it. Unfortunately, I was laughing too hard to take a good photo of the lazy susan thing (I was struggling with my Spanish and the disembodied voice seemed to be losing patience with me), thankfully, my sister was able to snap a picture. The convent courtyard was surprisingly quiet-- a haven of silence in the middle of the bustling city.

The purchase window at the convent

A classically español tiled plaque in the convent courtyard

posted by sheryl | 12:02 PM |

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